You are entitled to your opinion. I personally don't agree. Maybe it's a limitation caused by my own incompetence, but being able to think of this task as "events" and transitions between those events, in the manner which POE development prescribes, has removed a great deal of complexity and overhead from a great many tasks I've personally had to tackle. POE doesn't add considerable processing overhead (we're tailing a file, the Von Neumann bottleneck is going to make sure we're IO bound), it makes the structure painfully obvious to the future reader: "there is a file that is being tailed, and upon hitting some regular expression, we delay some named event by $timeout time," and it's ridiculously portable! It worked on my WinXP box where I happen to code for a living (*you* try to get alarms on perl 5.6.1 on Win32!) And I can pretty much guarantee, it would work on *most* OSs pretty cleanly, due to the use of a comprehensive and rather brilliant 3rd party framework.

I'll be honest, I'm relatively certain that I've been trolled. But, you did raise a good point, why use POE when a few while loops, if statements, and whatnot would probably do? Because it simplifies the task for *me*... and that's what this is all about, what makes eduardo happy. :)